Sacrario Militare di Castel Dante
| Sacrario Militare di Castel Dante | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Data | |
| place | Rovereto , Province of Trento |
| architect | Ferdinando Biscaccianti |
| Construction year | 1933-1936 |
| height | 34 m |
| Floor space | 44,000 m² |
| Coordinates | 45 ° 52 '17.1 " N , 11 ° 2' 4" E |
The Castel Dante memorial or the Castel Dante ossuary ( Italian Sacrario Militare di Castel Dante or just Ossario Castel Dante ) is located in the northern Italian city of Rovereto in the province of Trento . The monumental building from the 1930s contains the remains of over 20,000 fallen soldiers from the First World War .
location
The building stands on the south-eastern outskirts of Rovereto on a small hill. There used to be a castle on the site, the Castello di Lizzana, of which ruins are still preserved on the east side of the ossuary . According to legend, Dante Alighieri stayed in the castle at the beginning of the 14th century.
Historical background
After the end of the First World War there were a large number of smaller and larger military cemeteries along the former Italian-Austro-Hungarian front , the maintenance of which was associated with some costs, so that one quickly came to the conclusion that these cemeteries should be merged as much as possible and their number to zoom out. The attempt of the Italian government through a corresponding law to transfer the bones of the fallen to the cemeteries of the respective hometowns free of charge at the request of the bereaved, met with little response.
The construction of central memorials, as in France, was viewed with skepticism, as the anonymity of such buildings was rejected. The attempt was therefore made to find a balance between anonymous, monumental memorials and individual graves such as those in military cemeteries. The alleged solution was thought to have been found in the construction of ossuary, in which the dead known by name were to be buried in individual graves.
In doing so, they did not follow a uniform line, but this was determined by the respective head of the Central Office for War Graves Care ( Ufficio Centrale Onoranze ai Caduti in Guerra in Italian ), which was headed by General Faracovi from 1927 to 1935 and from 1936 by Ugo Cei. Faracovi's management was characterized by the fact that he commissioned various architects to carry out the projects. It was based on monumentality, the claim to eternity and the individuality of the tombs. Under the direction of Ugo Cei, who entrusted the execution to the architect Greppi and the sculptor Castiglione, the relation to the land was emphasized as an emotional, ascending, cleansing element, as was particularly emphasized at the two memorials Redipuglia and Monte Grappa . However, both lines are the implementation of the above. Compromise between anonymous monumental building and individual graves in common, and only the unknown dead were to find their final resting place in mass graves.
For the fascist state , the cult of the dead represented the possibility of underlining supposed values such as heroism, willingness to make sacrifices and warriorism, whereby the concepts of state and party were also deliberately exchanged with one another.
So it came about that the war dead became an instrument of political ideological currents, which continued even after 1945. In the eyes of the 1968, these memorials were negatively affected and evidence of fascism that should therefore be demolished. Sites of a long-gone militarism and a fascism-borne death of the masses.
The locations selected for the individual memorials were also symbolic and rich in interpretation. Some underlined the resistance of the Italian troops, such as on Monte Grappa, on the Montello or in Fagarè on the Piave , others emphasized the offensive spirit of the same, as in Redipuglia or Oslavia. As a sign of victory, some were built in places far away from the actual war events, along the state border with Austria ( Burgeis , Innichen , Gossensaß ).
history
During the First World War, Italian units of the Mantua infantry brigade occupied the hill of Castel Dante at the end of 1915 and expanded it like a base. The trenches and trenches that now run along the northeast side of the memorial date from this time . The hill was then conquered by Austro-Hungarian troops in the course of the Austro-Hungarian South Tyrol offensive and then played no role in the further course of the war.
In 1920 the municipality of Rovereto decided to build a military cemetery on this site. This should take the fallen from the area of Rovereto, including from the battlefields on Monte Pasubio . The then war ministry, however, refused the final approval for the project after the municipal administration had already been commissioned to purchase the property.
As a result, a private committee was formed in 1921 under the leadership of the municipality with the aim of promoting the construction and raising the necessary financial means for the reburial of the remains. On March 20, 1926, the purchase contract for the property was concluded. As the final act of the committee, it carried out the project for the planned access road to the memorial, which was implemented by the community. The committee disbanded in October of the same year. The Rovereto War Museum took its place .
In 1928 the head of the Italian war graves commission, Faracovi, passed on the decision to the municipal administration to build a monumental ossuary in place of the military cemetery that had now been established. At the end of 1931 the public tender for the project was published, which in 1933 was entrusted to the Bologna- born architect Biscaccianti. The construction period was three years and work began in the same year, after the remains that had been transferred from the front cemeteries had been exhumed several times. The building was finally inaugurated on November 4, 1938.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, following the abandonment of other cemeteries, the remains of almost 7,500 dead were reburied in Castel Dante.
Today a total of over 20,000 Italian, Austro-Hungarian and the fallen of the Czechoslovak legions fighting on the Italian side are buried here. The two irredentists, Damiano Chiesa and Fabio Filzi, who fight for Italy, have found their final resting place here . The bones of the Hungarian aviation ace of the kuk aviation troops Josef Kiss were also transferred to Castel Dante in the 1970s.
The memorial is maintained by the General Commissariat for War Graves Care (Italian Commissariato Generale per le Onoranze ai Caduti ), which reports to the Ministry of Defense .
description
The building consists of two structures, the cylindrical rotunda on which a dome-shaped iron roof rests and a two-tiered base in which the grave niches are housed. Wide stairs lead tapering over the base to the entrance of the monumental building.
The outer facade is interrupted by high columns with windows behind them, which are placed around the central structure. Two large windows, one directly above the entrance and one on the opposite side, provide sufficient light in the interior.
To the left and right of the entrance there are inscriptions with the numbers of the fallen buried here.
The interior consists of two floors and an intermediate floor. The entrance is on the upper floor, which forms a single room up to the dome roof. Opposite the entrance is an altar and on the two side walls between the altar and the entrance are the monumental tombs of Damiano Chiesa and Fabio Filzi set into the wall.
Two side stairs lead to the floor below and the mezzanine floor, which are housed in the base of the building. In these are the graves, which are laid out in a ring, on the mezzanine floor only with a ring, on the floor below with two rings, an inner and an outer ring. For every dead person known by name, there is a grave slab on which the deceased's rank and name are engraved. A circular row of columns in the middle of the lower floor surrounds the bust of the Marshal of Italy Guglielmo Pecori Giraldi standing on a pedestal .
literature
- Lisa Bregantin, Denis Vidale: Sentinelle di pietra. I grandi sacrari del primo conflitto mondiale. Biblioteca dei Leoni, Castelfranco Veneto 2016, ISBN 978-88-98613-69-4 .
- Aldo Gorfer: I castelli di Rovereto e della Valle Lagarina. Saturnia, Trento 1994.
- Ministero della Difesa, Comitato Generale Onoranze Caduti in Guerra (ed.): Sacrari militari della prima guerra mondiale 1915-1918. Castel Dante di Rovereto. Rome 1971.
Web links
- Information and opening times for the memorial in German , accessed on February 28, 2017.
- Information and photos in Italian , accessed February 28, 2017.
References and comments
- ↑ Corresponds to the entire site of the memorial.
- ↑ Named after the Rovereto district at the foot of the hill.
- ↑ Lisa Bregantin, Denis Vidale: Sentinelle di pietra. I grandi sacrari del primo conflitto mondiale. P. 14 f
- ↑ Lisa Bregantin, Denis Vidale: Sentinelle di pietra. I grandi sacrari del primo conflitto mondiale. P. 19
- ↑ Lisa Bregantin, Denis Vidale: Sentinelle di pietra. I grandi sacrari del primo conflitto mondiale. P. 20
- ↑ The cult of the dead striven for by fascism stood in opposition to the goals striven for by the church, in whose eyes the mourning for the dead was a purely private matter and should not be taken over by the state.
- ↑ Lisa Bregantin, Denis Vidale: Sentinelle di pietra. I grandi sacrari del primo conflitto mondiale. P. 26
- ↑ Some plaques of veterans' associations of the Mantua Brigade at the memorial also refer to these events.
- ↑ Some graves were dug here during the war.
- ↑ a b c History of the Ossario Castel Dante Committee in Italian (PDF; 388 kB), accessed on February 24, 2017.
- ↑ Due to the lack of legal requirements, the contract was not signed by the committee, but by the Italian Association of War Invalids (Italian Associazione Nazionale Mutilati ed Invalidi di Guerra ).
- ↑ A memorial plaque on the lower floor of the building reminds of this.
- ↑ A breakdown by known and unknown names as well as by affiliation can be found on two panels to the left and right of the entrance to the rotunda.
photos
Outdoor area
Panoramic shot
The site in the 1920s
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